Good theory, thanks. I'm wondering if there might be another cause here. The Airbus is fly-by-wire. Early in the history of this aircraft, near Paris - may even been a demo flight at the Paris airshow, the computer that controled the instructions sent to the control surfaces was a contributing cause. This is from memory of many years ago, but as I remember the pilot may have flown into a situation that required different control surface movement than the computer would allow. In effect, the computer over-rode the pilots commands.
One wonders if something like this might have happened. The aircraft encountered the wake and the data recorders measured the 0.3 to 0.8 acceleration. This acceleration is insufficient to cause separation of the stabilizer and is consistent with other information about how the vortex may tend to throw the aircraft out of the wake. However, the vortex impinging upon the rudder caused it to begin to oscillate. The computer read this as some kind of unusual situation and began to send a series of counter commands at high rate. This might cause a high amplitude, high frequency vibration to be transmitted to the structure connecting the stabilizer to the tail inducing a failure in these connectors. There could even be some kind of a feed back loop that might persist after the aircraft exited the wake. In effect, what I'm saying is that the computer might have gone nuts when it encountered something outside it's program.
Don't know if this makes sense to others but it's at least as good a theory as most I've seen here. I agree with most folks here that 0.3 to 0.8 gs should be insufficient to cause separation, but I think a lot of folks should remember that accelerations have both magnitudes, directions, and in the case of vibrations a frequency. 0.8 gs might not be much of a problem in a steady load, but it can cause problems if it is not steady, but has a frequency of many hertz, ie, it's off and on very rapidly.
The A300-600 does not use fly-by-wire technology. That started later with the smaller A320, which is the one that crashed at the Paris airshow. Incidentally, the pilot of that A320 was arrested for drunk driving a few months later (yes, he survived the crash). Apparently he was something of a head case, so the Paris crash probably tells us nothing about the viability of fly-by-wire aircraft.
One wonders if something like this might have happened. The aircraft encountered the wake and the data recorders measured the 0.3 to 0.8 acceleration. This acceleration is insufficient to cause separation of the stabilizer and is consistent with other information about how the vortex may tend to throw the aircraft out of the wake. However, the vortex impinging upon the rudder caused it to begin to oscillate. The computer read this as some kind of unusual situation and began to send a series of counter commands at high rate. This might cause a high amplitude, high frequency vibration to be transmitted to the structure connecting the stabilizer to the tail inducing a failure in these connectors. There could even be some kind of a feed back loop that might persist after the aircraft exited the wake. In effect, what I'm saying is that the computer might have gone nuts when it encountered something outside it's program. Worth a bump. After all, both engines came off as well as the tail, and eyewitnesses described the plane as "wobbling" in the air. There seem to be few if any precedents for a commercial airliner coming so completely unglued. A violent, computer-driven oscillation certainly seems like a possibility.